The present invention relates to search engines and more specifically to search engines used to locate goods and services on the Internet.
A Web page is a sequence of text, optionally including images, that can be requested from a client, such as a Web browser, from a computer or Web server on a network. A Web site is a collection of stored or dynamically generated Web pages.
A URL is a string of characters that serves as the address of a Web page. A client sends a URL to a Web server, and receives the corresponding Web page in return.
Some Web pages allow visitors to make purchases. For example, a Web page may contain information about an item for sale, along with a button that allows the person seeing the page to place an order for it.
A search engine is a program that helps users find information in a network of Web pages. Users submit to the search engine words or phrases indicating what they a searching for, and the search engine replies with a list of Web pages it predicts are relevant to that query. The page considered by a search engine for inclusion in this list can be termed a xe2x80x9ctarget pagexe2x80x9d.
The list of Web pages returned by a search engine is ranked by relevancy. Typically, relevancy is determined mostly by the content of the target pages.
For example, if the user searches for xe2x80x9cchocolate cakexe2x80x9d, a typical search engine will rank pages containing the phrase xe2x80x9cchocolate cakexe2x80x9d before those which merely contain the words xe2x80x9cchocolatexe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9ccakexe2x80x9d separately, and those pages will in turn be ranked higher than pages that contain one of the two words but not the other.
One of the reasons people use search engines is to search for items for sale. A user who wants to buy a digital camera online will often begin by going to a search engine and using xe2x80x9cdigital cameraxe2x80x9d as the search phrase.
Existing search engines vary in how they rank pages. The rank of a target page usually depends in part on a textual match with the search phrase. Search engines designed specifically for online shopping may also look at information on the target page, such as price and availability, and use that to determine the ranking. The Web site in which a page occurs may also influence the ranking of that page.
In general, a search occurs as follows: (1) the user submits a query Q to a search engine, (2) the search engine returns a list of target pages, ranked based on their content, (3) the user goes to one of the pages in the list of search results and perhaps, while visiting the Web site containing that page, places an order. However, someone searching for the name of a product, like xe2x80x9cdigital cameraxe2x80x9d, probably wants to buy it, and so wants to be given a list of pages where they can do so.
The search engines depend on site and page contents. For example, suppose that a search engine knows of two sites, A and B, that each have pages containing the phrase xe2x80x9cdigital cameraxe2x80x9d. The two pages score the same for that phrase using whatever algorithm the search engine uses to rank pages. But whereas Site A is a well-designed site inspiring the consumer to buy, Site B is not well designed and does not appeal to customers. To maximize sales, the search engine should preferably rank Site A before Site B. However, short of having a human look at both sites, it is difficult to ensure that the page from Site A appears ahead of the page from Site B in the search results.
A search engine selects one or more search hits from among a plurality of hits, wherein a hit is a reference to a page or a site, based on a user interest, comprising an input module for accepting a query from a user, the query representing an interest of the user; a tracking module for tracking the user""s navigation through the plurality of pages, including at least a destination purchase page, the destination purchase page being a page from which the user makes a purchase; a sales module which records associations between purchases and queries where the associations are provided, at least in part by an output of the tracking module; and a search module, which takes as its inputs at least a query and sales associations of that query provided by the sales module, and which outputs one or more search hits based on at least the query and the sales associations of that query. In some systems, instead of using sales data to alter the weights of the search results, merchant bidding is used to alter the weights of the search results, or a combination of the two is used.